Why we must finally honour the men of RAF Bomber Command

At the time of the Battle of Britain in 1940, Winston Churchill highlighted
the crucial importance of offensive bombing.

By Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Michael Beetham, President of the Bomber Command Association

6:50PM GMT 27 Oct 2008

In paying tribute to 'the Few' he stated: "The fighters are our salvation but the bombers alone provide the means of victory."

In other words, to defeat Nazi Germany, defending our island would not be enough: Britain had to attack. And between the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 and the D-Day landings of June 1944, there was no way of directly attacking Germany itself – other than by bombing.

Night bombing in those early days was in its infancy. Navigation aids were rudimentary – aircrews still used sextants. Yet they were expected to pinpoint military and industrial targets, often a single factory, deep inside Germany at night.

Frequent bad weather and poor visibility made this a near impossible challenge. Eventually the War Cabinet ordered that, unless weather conditions allowed otherwise, attacks had to be directed mainly on the area-bombing of industrial cities – to increase the likelihood of damaging something – even if it was only the morale of German industrial workers.

Although many of the aircrews would have preferred otherwise, there was little choice and of course, the Germans had already pioneered the practice of area-bombing cities during the Blitz, killing 43,000 British civilians.

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By 1943/44 Bomber Command was sending hundreds of bombers a night over Europe – forcing the Germans on to the defensive. This had a vital strategic effect: one million men, tens of thousands of weapons and aircraft and a mass of resources had to be diverted from the Germans' struggle with the Russians on the Eastern Front to defend the homeland against the bomber attacks from the West.

Albert Speer, Hitler's armaments minister, later described the bomber offensive from the Nazis' perspective as "the greatest lost battle of the war".

But the cost was painfully heavy. All RAF aircrews were volunteers, with an average age of 22. Of 125,000 bomber aircrew involved, more than 55,000 were killed, over 8,000 were wounded and nearly 10,000 were prisoners of war. This was on a scale proportionate to British casualties in the trenches during the worst period of World War One.

Bomber Command's contribution to victory (and loss of aircrew lives) was widely recognised at the time. But no specific campaign medal was awarded at the end of the war. Churchill, sensing potential political squeamishness when the devastation of Germany by bombing would become clear, distanced himself from the bombing campaign he had personally initiated and encouraged.

In July 1945 he was also out of office and the new Labour Government under Clement Attlee steadfastly refused requests for a medal. This shows how quickly the circumstances under which the War Cabinet had ordered the policy, in the darkest days of the conflict, were forgotten!

Bomber Command was originally set up to bomb purely military targets and indeed did so in attacking every aspect of Germany's war machine: armaments factories, ports, U-boat pens, shipping, oil refineries, transport links, troop concentrations, air bases, rail links, communications, military headquarters and even dams. But much of the effort, in darkness and impossible conditions, had to be in the form of area bombing. It was crude but effective: Germany's war making capacity was held back and eventually crippled. When the Allied armies finally did invade Europe in 1944 they fought their way to liberate Europe with massive direct bomber support.

It is the recognition of what was achieved in the wide range of our sustained operations over the whole five years of the war that we now seek. A Memorial in Central London to the many young men who died and to the vital contribution made by Bomber Command to victory would provide that recognition.

* Sir Michael Beetham DFC was a Lancaster bomber pilot in the Second World War, flying his first raid over Berlin at the age of 20. He went on to become Chief of the Air Staff, the professional head of the Royal Air Force.